Using CoS When Entries Have Natural Relationships

Consider an enterprise directory in which every employee has a manager.
Every employee shares a mail stop and fax number with the nearest administrative
assistant. Figure 8–7 demonstrates
the use of indirect CoS to retrieve the department number from the manager
entry. In Figure 8–8, the mail stop
and fax number are retrieved from the administrative assistant entry.

Figure 8–7 Generating DepartmentNumber With
Indirect CoS

In this implementation, the manager’s entry has a real value for departmentNumber, and this real value overrides any generated value.
Directory Server does not generate attribute values from CoS-generated
attribute values. Thus, in the Figure 8–7 example,
the department number attribute value needs to be managed only on the manager's
entry. Likewise, for the example shown in Figure 8–8, mail stop and fax number attributes need to be managed
only on the administrative assistant’s entry.

Figure 8–8 Generating Mail Stop and Fax Number With Indirect
CoS

A single CoS definition entry can be used to exploit relationships such
as these for many different entries in the directory.

Another natural relationship is service level. Consider an Internet
service provider that offers customers standard, silver, gold, and platinum
packages. A customer’s disk quota, number of mailboxes, and rights
to prepaid support levels depend on the service level purchased. The following
figure demonstrates how a classic CoS scheme enables this functionality.